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Wayland's Weston Lands In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

03-13-2012, 10:20 PM

Phoronix: Wayland's Weston Lands In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Landing today within Ubuntu's 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" repository is Weston, the reference compositor for the Wayland Display Server. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS won't have a full-on Wayland preview as was originally hoped for last November...

If you want to test Wayland, and toolkits without compiling anything, or waiting for Ubuntu, I released a live ISO with Wayland, and with the GTK QT and EFL toolkits, along with the rootless X server that runs in Wayland.

GTK apps don't all work. They need to be on GTK 3, and it seems that some have X stuff in them that need to be removed.

I'm working on compiling kdelibs around the wayland QT. right now all that works is the demo qt apps though.

I only got Elementary tests to run under Wayland, because I am not fluent in that desktop environment, and really not sure what apps run on EFL...

The nested X server comes really close to working, but it doesn't refresh the window contents unless you resize it.

Comment

So I'm supposing Compiz already supports OpenGL ES 2? Or are we just talking about using Weston as a preview by 12.10?

I think that Arch may be the best bet for getting the more complete Wayland support by year's end. However, it does still depend on when Qt5 will be released, and if the changes will be backported to Qt4 in any way (I'm not sure how quickly developers will update, although I hear most Qt apps will handle the update without any code changes).

Of course, there is the question of how complete GTK 3.4's Wayland backend is going to be. We may have to wait until 3.6 in the Fall to see it all really fall into place, after Wayland 1.0.

Still, these are exciting times- I'm surprised Wayland has come so far in so short a time. As long as it's usable within a year, I'd say the developers have succeeded in their goal. I can't wait until we look back at X11 and laugh.

Comment

How about GTK and Qt?
Will I be able to run GNOME Terminal? gedit? xterm?

Will I be able to run X on top of Wayland? or Wayland inside X?

You can run gedit and many Qt applications with Weston right now (including the Qt Web Browser). The main issue is with the remaining bugs in the GTK backend, which may prevent the use of modal dialogs and menus. Wayland 1.0 isn't out yet, so a lot of stuff still won't work completely.

I believe the embedded X server already runs under Weston- I saw some videos of this in action. I think that something like E17 could easily handle taking away the window manager's border and rendering just the application portion of the X server to that window. Of course, considering how flexible Wayland is, I suspect these issues will be sorted out as soon as a DE tries to completely support it.